Visual Abstraction in Computer Game Design

Driven partially by technological innovation and partially by a lack of a critical vocabulary, there is a bias in the computer gaming world towards discussing games in terms of their level of realism. This thesis contends that this bias is inappropriate for accurately discussing a medium whose pleasures are more closely related to concepts of reactivity, flow and kinesthetics than visual aesthetics. I propose to explore the relationship between representational graphics and immersivity in games by producing a suite of simple game interactions whose visual language is constrained to abstract shapes and symbols.